The invention relates to a punching, reading and printing machine for document cards.
Some machines of this general type, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,642,197, have included a hopper holding a document card deck in substantially vertical disposition, with the cards being fed off of one end of the card deck onto a generally horizontal transport bed. After leaving the card hopper, the cards were transported to punching, reading and printing mechanisms, while remaining in horizontal disposition, and the printing mechanism comprised a rotatable wheel with a row of print characters on its periphery and mounted so that its axis extended transversely of the path of card movement. Each character along a line of printing extending longitudinally of a document card was produced by the single row of print characters, and the swingable print hammers for providing the printing in connection with the print characters on the wheel extended longitudinally of the path of card travel. Since each of the characters in the row of printing was produced by the single character row, the machine was relatively slow.